PC legend

[Dave A]

Kinda thinking about the early days of personal computing right now - and feeling a little wierd.

http://mg.co.za/article/2011-10-06-apples-steve-jobs-dies-from-cancer

RIP Steve Jobs.

[AmithS]

Just heard the news on the radio!

Just after stepping down as CEO!

RIP Steve Jobs!

[AndyD]

Yep, love him, hate him there's no denying he made a difference

RIP Steve

[popayetwo]

Remember that ghastly Apple II ? There were MUCH better computers at that time. Apple only started to get better with the macintosh.

[tec0]

Being in love with apple products I have to say that quality and functionality was always the idea behind them all. That said products like the Blackberry Playbook would not have existed was it not for Steve Jobs pushing the advancement of mobile tech.

His ideas can be seen in almost any piece of tech to date. Apple products always looked good and preformed great, given that the product was boycotted by game developers and Microsoft. Because of apple, a computer was no longer just a metal box, it was stylish desirable and for the most part functional.

So indeed love him or hate him Steve Jobs legacy will be the foundation for all tech to come.

RIP Steve Jobs

[Dave A]

Remember that ghastly Apple II ? There were MUCH better computers at that time.

That's part of the problem. I do remember working with these newfangled gadgets
And the scraps about which was more prestigous - having letters printed by dot matrix printer or golf ball typewriter
And "cheap" PC's that cost more than a cheap car,
And "paper white" screens replacing the green screen,

And me being a young upstart at the time

[Martinco]

golf ball typewriter

I used to repair these in my youth ! ( I still have some spare parts in my garage )

Later these were coupled to some of the mainframes and smaller office equipment as an output device. The electronics to drive the typewriter was amazingly simple, but the mechanics !!! Bear in mind that the only electrics in it were the switch and the motor . But it worked.

[Wander]

I just saw that Kalahari.net has his official biography on sale. That is the only biography that I would actually read, and that says a lot. I hate biographies. I hope discovery channel has a special on him soon.

[wynn]

Steve in Heaven

Is this Heaven?

[irneb]

Strange how Jobs' death makes front-page news nearly everywhere. But when someone who's had (arguably) much more influence on everything (computer based) we have today , dies, it's a near unknown:

Anyone even knew about Dennis Ritchie being the "father of Unix and C"?

http://www.zdnet.com/news/dennis-ritchie-father-of-unix-and-c-dies/6314570

[irneb]

Another one:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-20125026-92/john-mccarthy-creator-of-lisp-programming-language-dies/

We're loosing giants!

[Dave A]

Whatever has become of self-learning AI programs?

I can remember tinkering with them in the '80s - would have thought they'd have come a long way and be a lot more prominent by now.

And is anyone still using Fortran?

[irneb]

I think the way those "self-learning" AI programs worked in those days was more like a growing decision tree (thus the Lisp language was the most effective for such). These days such algorithms are mostly used inside of database engines (data mining). And of course those attempts at making autonomous cars. It's not so much that AI has disappeared ... it's that the definition is a recursively changing definition

AI research is that which computing scientists do not know how to do cost-effectively today.

E.g. in the 50's optical character recognition (OCR) was considered a form of AI. These day's it's nearly ubiquitous.

[Dave A]

Thinking about it, maybe Google search is a modern day example of what would have been seen as an AI fuzzy logic script back then.

Car motor electronic start-up routines also "learn" as they go too, I've heard.

Amazing really. It's so easy to take digital technology today for granted. It's only when you look back at those early days and just how relatively brief its history is that you get to appreciate just how dramatic progress in the digital revolution has been.

[irneb]

Yep. The deeper tragedy behind this is not so much that we're loosing the people who started it all. It seems to be that IT inventions have been petering out since the 50's. The boom in new technology (electronic) since WW2 and then ever less invention rich decades thereafter ... call them a move towards refining instead of designing.

I wonder if it's a similar scenario as happened at the end of the 1800's - start of the 1900's: i.e. when the explorers ran out of places to explore. Is it that we've reached the limits of possibilities with electronics? Do we need to look for new paradigms for future evolution? Or are we simply on a road to stagnation?